OBITER DICTA.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18894, 8 January 1927, Page 14

OBITER DICTA.

(Bj K.) China is so tactless. If it were not for China the world, as presented by the runner who throws the paper into the largest of our summer puddles at 3 a.m., would be as simple and harmless as in the holiday seasons of past years. All the large, horrid happenings cease, and the placid talc of Mr Bruce's missionary speeches in Canada and of the price of butter and spot tin is gently coloured by mixed Motherings. On Thursday, for instance, one cable message recorded a speech to which the Educational Conference "listened with rapt attention." The speaker was denouncing " over-mother-ing," which he. said was the cause of "henpecked husbands." Another cable message reported a different explanation of the fact that men arc so downtrodden by the female of the species. This was in an address by " the director of the Tavistock Clinic for Functional Nerve Oases." If mother wants a. girl and gets a boy, the boy grows up into a lady, and in the opposite case the girl grows up into a betterdead. A third message on the same day reported the presidential address to the English Head Masters' Association. This was an attack on the Cinema, .which is " typical of everything deserving our most vigilant hostility as protectors of the young." So that whether you are over-mothered, or whether you ought to have been a girl, or whether you like Charlie Chaplin, no good can come of it.

There were other cable messages, of course. For example, a barque full of negroes exploded near Baltimore. But, except for tactless China, nobody has been .furnishing the bad news that usually fills the papers. A journalist friend with whom I discussed the quietude of the world during the holiday season said that one must not draw large conclusions. The problem is the old problem of the hen and the egg—which is the effect and which the cause? Do the newspapers cause the news, or docs the news cause the newspapers? The pacifist, and all the advanced people, believe that the newspapers cause wars, and if they can cause wars, they could obviously more easily cause murders and divorces. But the local pacifists are all at Arthur's Pass educating each other's brains by climbing Mt. Rolleston and listening to lectures on the psychology of umbrellas and the difference between the plays of Eugene O'Neill and the poems of Eliza Cook. Therefore our highbrows cannot be consulted upon the problem that is worrying me.

The truth is, I think, that the Christmas season is the cranks' holiday —the season of conferences. Those I have already mentioned iare specimens only. Another conference has given the Professor of Zoology at South Kensington an opportunity to point out that prize , boars, hideously deformed, but admirable for the ends of the bacon-purer, will regain their old svelte figures and snouts and teeth if they are allowed to run wild. So, too,